Half a Sky: The Coscuin Chronicles Book 2

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Besides, Elaine, when I do make my own life, I set it beside the one already made for me by outrageous hands, and I find the two to be substantially the same. And then they merge. It's always been in those lines with me.”

  And, just at quick dark, they all (everyone that you know on Basse-Terre, many that you don't know, about fifty persons in all) arrived at Greenfields to dine in splendor by the grace of the absent Count Cyril and that of his kinsmen and kinswomen, and the stewarts; and those good local people themselves who had taken on the estate three kids, three lambs, a colt, a calf, and slaughtered and roasted them for the dinner which the Count himself approved in his absence.

  What high things happened there that night can't be given here. They have a vanishing quality. They are remembered forever in pleasure, but they're disremembered in detail. It was happy spirit of the island in all the eating and drinking and talking and green glitter. And the Spirit of the Island was there herself literally, and might be seen by all eyes but those of Dana.

  “Look away, look away!” they'd all warn Dana when the Spirit of the Island came into any room where he might be. He was not allowed to see her at all till second morning from then. The people would hold up sheets or curtains to block out his sight of her. They'd put their fingers in his ears to block off her voice (he wasn't supposed to hear that either). Even Elaine Kingsberry who had been eating her own heart a little (and finding it of a somewhat happy and pleasant taste) joined in these games. Finally Celeste put blindfold on Dana, and Carolina filled his ears full of moss. He couldn't see the bodied Spirit, he couldn't hear her, but with other senses he enjoyed her.

  They had a grand dinner and a fine half-night of it. There could not have been more gracious or memorable entertainment if the Count Cyril himself had been there present at Greenfields.

  And just at half-night, at midnight, Dana returned to his own house abuilding and went to bed in the bay-bed. It was the first night he had slept at home anywhere for those five years and it was all brimming peace till that black hour just before false dawn.

  Ifreann came to him then, out of the flesh in all likelihood (Dana refused to open his eyes to see, and even seeing wouldn't be to know), and harassed Dana and himself with imagined and utterly foolish worries and deliriums.

  “I have to know about the child's bones in the little coffin, Dana,” Ifreann said with an almost gentleness that could hardly be covered by the natural rank harshness of his voice. “Of whose issue are they, Dana, yours or mine?”

  “There's no sense in your question or in you,” Dana said sleepily. “How could they be of anyone's issue? But I'm knowing little about them, Ifreann. Sometimes there are a few little bones mixed with other junk in the coffin. And sometimes they're not to be found there at all. I don't know what they are.” Dana was speaking honestly out of his sleep.

  “They're the bones of Catherine's son,” Ifreann said.

  “Catherine had no son.”

  “No son born. But she did have a son, and those are some of his bones. Who fathered them, Dana?”

  “Who but myself, Ifreann? Nobody else ever had her. If there had been issue, and there wasn't, he'd be mine.”

  “I lusted for Catherine in life and I raped her in death,” Ifreann was saying heavily. “I believe that the bones are those of my son and not of yours. How would a man of the common sort engender loose bones in a little chest?”

  “Get out of my head, get out of my house, get out of my dream, Ifreann, or I'll kill you finally, be you fantôme or real.”

  “You cannot, Dana, not at this time. I cannot be touched by you. As to the bones, there is a test. There is one bone which ourselves and most animals have and which men do not have. This is the os penis. Is it ever to be found among the bones in the chest?”

  “Foul fiend take you, Ifreann, save that you're already one and among them. I wouldn't know the os penis if I saw it. I begin to wake up now, and I'll set my hand to kill you at once.”

  “I tell you that you cannot, Dana, not at this time. But you will know the bone if you see it. It'll affect you strangely. Wake at once and look. I can only see into the chest with your eyes. I must know whether the bones are of my son or of yours.”

  Dana woke in a fury. He put hand to knife and to pistol. He howled out his hate of this Son of the Devil and of all devils. He shot the pistol three times at shadows. They could not have been anything else; there was nothing but shadows there. He gashed and lashed with the hand knife. But Ifreann was fantôme and not flesh, and he had already vanished away.

  Several wakeful-eared men came from different directions to see what the night shooting was about. But they were, each one of them, intercepted and sent back on their way by Angelene Domdaniel. She explained to them that it was a private passion of Dana's and that he must not be disturbed in it.

  When clear dawn came, Dana did open the chest and look at the small bones that were in it. They were very small this morning, as small as mouse bones. There was no doubt that they were the bones of an unborn child. They were gathered all together now and not mingled with the other junk in the coffin as they usually were.

  There was a skull almost complete. It wasn't a pumpkin-shaped skull like that of Ifreann, not even in miniature. There were half the ribs. There was a wrist bone so small that even Dana with his fine eyes had trouble identifying it. There was one tibia only there; it was the longest of all the bones, but it wasn't complete. Not very many bone remnants (or bone intuitions, if they were that) but there were more of the small pieces than there had ever been before.

  There was no os penis among them. That was the test. Devils and most animals have this bone; humans haven't. Ifreann himself had said that Dana would know the bone if it were there. It wasn't.

  Dana was impelled, however (possibly by Ifreann who could see into the chest only through Dana's eyes), to turn through all the other items in the coffin. There were papers quite new, quite impossible of normal appearance in the coffin; there were clippings from the foreign press ('twould have to be from a foreign press; there was no press on Basse-Terre); there were letters, some of them from and to persons that Dana didn't know at all; there was a piece on the Green Revolution by a Scotchman (he didn't mean the same thing by the Green Revolution as Catherine had meant, as Brume and others had meant); there were some small (almost microscopic) sea-shells of the kind that are called triton-shells; there were French cartoons. There were several Dutch gold coins. There was a Mexican scored dollar or piece-of-eight. There weren't any other bones.

  Dana closed the coffin and pushed it away from him. He exploded out of his dazed frustration. He'd been compelled to make this examination by another. Now he stood in pale anger and anguish, in quaking horror before the hint of Ifreann's suggestion. There was a dirtiness forever in everything that Ifreann had touched, but he had not touched Catherine that way, not in life. This was the one thing that could not have been, the thing that must not even be considered.

  Twenty-four hours later, Dana Coscuin was married to — to the Bride of Dana Cosquin, of course; to the Green Spirit of the Island. They were married before God and before all the good people of Basse-Terre Town. Then Dana and his Bride went for one full week down to the Great Thermal Springs and lived in a house there.

  They were not disturbed at all by anyone that week. All the people from high to low had been warned by Dana and by the Bride to let them alone for their own moon-quarter. And every person on Basse-Terre had the good sense to be afraid of both Dana and his Bride when they should be riled. This week was important to the world as well as to the two persons involved. It contained the event and covenant of a renewed thing for the world.

  At the end of this week, Dana and Angelene left the Great Thermal Springs and moved into the House of Dana Cosquin. They were at home to everybody there from that time on. They entertained royally and boisterously. There was an ease and openness about everything now. There had never been anything that could go wrong with it. It had always been
made that Dana Coscuin should join this Angelene Domdaniel.

  Now Dana compared the accomplished fact of it with the thing as previously made up by transcending hands: those of Count Cyril, perhaps; those of Scheherazade of Amsterdam; those of the fate-weaving Angelene Domdaniel herself. Dana found the two versions to be substantially the same. And then they merged.

  A week later (it had been a busy and burgeoning week for everybody), Charley Oceaan came to the happy place of Dana and Angelene with a trace of worry.

  “There is this difficulty, Dana and Angelene,” he said. “I look at the future through a distorted glass, I suppose; but that future, as it touches you, seems to be shattered into two pieces. In the one piece I see Dana as carrying on the noble business of being married to Angelene Domdaniel here, of founding a family and home and small nation. But I also see clearly that myself and several others will go to Europe in exactly six weeks, and that Dana will be with us, completely with us. Both these futures can't be.”

  “Look again, Charley,” Dana jibed, “and you'll see Angelene in the party also. A Nation and a Family and a Home can be founded as well on sea as on land, as well in movement as in station. Shall we not do it that way, Angelene? There are adventures still unventured, and should we grow roots here?”

  “I'm already rooted here, Dana,” Angelene said quietly. “I will never leave this island. Yes, Charley, the future, as it touches us, is shattered into two pieces. I'll be a decade getting them together again. God is a little jealous of us, I believe, or else He has a very strange compassion on us: He doesn't want us to burn each other up. Will it be the same after a decade, do you think, Dana?”

  “Decade be damned!” Dana swore. “I'll not be leaving while you are here, Angelene. None but yourself could ever send me away. You and I will never be separated again.”

  “Oh yes, Dana. A messenger will come to you with messenger eyes and say ‘Go to Carloforte’; and you'll leave me and go.”

  “I'll not go for any messenger man in the world.”

  “What if for a messenger woman?”

  “No, no. I'll not go again at the bidding of any messenger with those weird eyes. None but yourself could ever send me away, Angelene. There's building that needs to be done here also. It needs a center. This'll be the vagrant Rome of the whole green movement. I'll not listen to a word from either of you now. I'll go talk with others who are more in their wits today: with the Stallion, with the Lady Valiente, with Serafino, with three new foreigners who have come here from three different lands. We will work these things out here. I have much to offer the movement, but I offer it here. There'll not be any division at all among us.”

  Dana went off to talk to the Stallion, to Valiente, to Serafino and Carolina, to some rather intelligent travelers, to others. And Angelene took the opportunity to explain to Charley Oceaan just what the Future would be, who would be the messenger to order Dana away, and what would be the outcome of it.

  “Angelene,” Dana said to his bride another week later, “I'd not told you about the small bones in the casket, but I was sure that you'd know about them without the telling, just as you know about everything else. They're gone. You've not thrown them out, have you?”

  “Thrown them out, and they so strange and priceless? Of course not, Dana. I've not thrown them out; I've taken them in.”

  “Taken them in? Angelene, where are those bones?”

  “Dana, are you eyeless and earless and heartless and brainless, all of them? Don't you know anything at all?”

  “Answer me, you changeling bride. Where are they?”

  “In my belly, of course.”

  There are some things too wondrous for anything except laughter. The explanation had its own wit and logic, and it was quite true. They'd been ghost bones all the while, and the most ghostly thing that can happen to a body is a pregnancy. Certainly Angelene had taken the bones in, and they grown a thousand times smaller than they'd ever been before. The most natural thing in the world it was, and there had been collusion, cahoots, here. “The most natural thing in the world is that the world should be a bit above the natural,” Catherine had said on the last morning of her life those more than five years ago. But it was all moment and no years for Catherine now, that supernal clown.

  “Thou Purgatorial Bark,” Dana called out of his laughing, “thou'st known of this coming all the time. But does that not carry the accord of the two of you to great lengths? And you, Angelene, are yourself a holy clown. But who thought of it, and who suspended the laws for it?”

  Anyhow, Angelene Domdaniel Coscuin was fruitful now, and Dana knew that it was his own issue. A little extra ghostliness at the beginning will do a child no harm.

  “Angelene,” Dana said some time later, “there were also certain French cartoons and texts of a horny sort in the box. I've been meaning to give them a better look. Where've you put them, my girl?”

  “In my belly also,” Angelene grinned. “The boy needs something to read and to look at during his long wait. I remember my own months in my mother. ‘Fire and Fountains!’ I swore, ‘I wish I had a little something to read and to look at in this close place, anything to pass the time with.’ Besides, Dana, those things are a little more lewd than what I'd allow yourself to peruse. But the boy enjoys them.”

  Angelene herself had been born with salt and sulphur on her tongue, and she couldn't lie without grinning. She'd taken the frenchy things herself to enjoy them, but she'd not allow her good man to have anything like that.

  Information of things current in the larger world Dana had in these pleasant days from three foreign visitors on Basse-Terre, and from Elaine Kingsberry and the Lady Valiente and Serafino and Carolina also. These people had always been current, or they quickly got current again from the mail packets.

  “The Devil has been stealing all the thunder,” one of the three foreign visitors told Dana. “He has assembled twelve disciples of the scribbling sort and has them all working for him. They are adept at their trade; some of them have intellect; all of them have strong person in their writings. They are much better at their job and of a much more single-minded devotion than were those flies of Montevideo whom you knew. These men have an urbanity and plausibility, a poetry, almost a sweetness so as to deceive all but the elect. Some of them seem good men, but all are in his employ, wittingly or unwittingly.”

  “Who are they?” Dana asked. “I'll be warned by your naming them. I'm a gullible sort and am likely to be taken in otherwise, by their urbanity and plausibility, by their poetry, and their almost sweetness. I'm easily taken sometimes.”

  “The twelve Devil's Disciples are Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Comte, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich David Strauss, Marx, Kierkegaard, Haeckel, Fechner, Fichte, Renan, Sainte-Beuve. You'll swear that some of them are not bad. I tell you, Irishman, they'd all be bad for you. Never before were there twelve such living and writing at once.”

  “Kemper knew of them a little,” Dana said. “He was carried away by the bookishness.”

  “But how was the Devil able to recruit all of them out from under the very nose of God?” the foreign visitor asked in wonder. “And how have they become of such influence? Has nobody been watching? Has none called ‘Custos, quid de nocte? Watchman, how goes the night?’ The night is going well, Irishman, for those of the night-nation.”

  “It is possible that God the Holy Ghost will come up with something,” Dana said. “He rallies, now and then, when it seems that He's soundly whipped.”

  “To set against these,” the foreign man said, “the Holy Spirit raises up naught but a few saints (some will be of the canon, and some otherwise). Only saints, Irishman, most of them simple, some of them ignorant (I except the luminous ignorance of the Curé d’Ars as a special thing; I have met him). Ah, lets make a dozen of these also: Anne Taigi, John Bosco, Catherine Labouré, Joseph Cottolengo, John Vianney (the Curé d’Ars of whom I spoke), Bernadette Soubirous (how have I her name? she's but a young girl yet), Monsignor Bonnand, Senestrey
of Ratisbon, Henry Manning, Father Cafasso, Leon Dupont, Frederic Ozanam. These are not the high saints such as other centuries have had. They are barely saints at all, and most will never be recognized as such. We need more. Are you a saint, Irishman?”

  “Not I,” Dana said. “I've a lot of fire to pass through before I'll be getting to the other side at all.”

  “I neither,” the man said. “But we need men of every sort. It is necessary that you go to Europe with us very soon. We'll need five hundred sound persons scattered here and there to stay with it at all in the battle with the principality. We'll need you.”

  “Are you the messenger come to me with messenger eyes?” Dana asked. “I'll not go.”

  Dana also became somewhat current on the political things of the world. Here also the Devil seemed to be acquiring advantage.

  Information of things more earthly and violent Dana had from the Stallion. He went to his old friend often. There was earth strength and knowledge to be got from merely mounting the noble beast. “There are things more rampant than myself that you'll have to break and ride,” the Stallion told Dana (not in words), and Dana got inklings of the fearsome businesses ahead.

  Information of things maritime Dana had from newly arrived seamen. There was one startling piece of news. A huge purplish man was sailing and steaming with a crew of horribly silent men (they'd all had their tongues cut out), coming in a medium-large iron-clad with cannons gleaming. This was a demented man, they said, and his like hadn't been seen around there before.

  But his like had been seen around there before. This was Ifreann Chortovitch coming home (Basse-Terre was Ifreann's home as well as Dana's), and now there'd be a tune to be danced and a devil to pay.

  “I like that touch about the horribly silent crewmen with their tongues cut out,” Dana said. “Ifreann always had the coarse touch.”